In 1960 scholars from across Italy gathered in Perugia to mark the seventh centenary of a devotional movement of 1260 which swept the Italian peninsula and led to the creation of flagellant confraternities in many cities and towns. Confraternities had been studied in Italy for years, both by local historians and antiquarians, and by those of a broader vision like G.M. Monti whose work Le confraternite medievali dell' alta e media Italia (1927) described developments across the peninsula. Yet the 1960 conference marked a departure. Historians intensified their research and brought new theoretical models to bear on their work. The conference papers were published under the title of Il movimento dei Disciplinati nel Settimo Centenario dal suo inizio (1962), and so stimulated research that a second conference was held in 1969. These papers too were published as Risultati e Prospettive della Ricerca sul Movimento dei Disciplinati (1972). Institutes devoted to confraternity studies have emerged in Perugia, Puglia, and elsewhere and the concentration of scholarly attention has generated a host of local studies and magisterial works like G.G. Meersseman's Ordo Fraternitatis: Confraternite e Pietà dei laici nel medioevo (1977), a study of Dominican confraternities from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries.

English-speaking scholars were less quick to recognize the significance of lay confraternities in Renaissance Italian society, due perhaps in part to a reluctance to deal with religion in a period which many still saw through Burckhardtian lenses.